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Wishing well

Nothing's gonna stop me 'til I'm done

Until I'm done

Parkway Drive, Wishing wells

A best-practice example for an Express-NodeJS microservices that can be used as a foundation for new services.

Wishing-well relies heavily on io-ts for environment variables and input validation.

It also encourages a functional style outside of handlers (i.e., where feasible) with the help of fp-ts. So having some idea of functional programming helps.

Sponsors sweap.io

Sponsored and used by sweap.io.

Features

  • TypeScript, eslint, Prettier, Jest, Nodemon
  • logging via Pino with request context
  • input validation with io-ts
  • embraces async/await in handlers via express-promise-router
  • configuration via environment variables
  • flexible, custom, semantic error handling using cause
  • fast build of slim container images (leveraging multi-stage builds)
  • good testability through (manual) dependency injection
  • pragmatic approach to functional programming, picking the good parts without being too academic

Required software

  • direnv to set environment variables for development (especially PATH to execute binaries from installed npm packages)
  • NodeJS > 18 for Error-cause-property
  • just to execute commands
  • jq to setup environment variables etc.,
  • gopass to set secrets for development
  • kcat
  • docker-compose

Project setup

The following strings need to be replaced/customized. Find them via git grep.

  • docker-repository
  • wishing-well
  • my-company

IntelliJ run TypeScript File

Select "NodeJS" configuration and add Node-Parameter -r ts-node/register.

Deployment

This depends heavily on the platform and your workflow. Typically, it's a good idea to boil down typical deployment commands into Justfile recipes which can be executed by CI/CD and manually.

Usage

  • tsc to check files
  • eslint src to lint files
  • nodemon src/index.ts to start the service and reload on changes (could also be npm run dev).
  • jest (or jest -w) to run tests
  • just ci to execute typical ci tasks in one go
  • just build to build the docker image

Philosophy

wishing-well is a collection of currently known best practices for NodeJS microservices. It has a clear idea of what works good, but of course it does not know everything. Maybe in the future some practices turn out to be not a good idea, maybe to work with legacy code it's necessary to bend the rules/ideas presented here, maybe you just don't like them.

Feel free to pick the pieces you like and change what you don't like.

Environment variables

All environment variables, required and optional, are defined in init/env.ts as io-ts type. Simple defaults (e.g. ports) can be defined via withFallback.

Optional values can typically be modeled as t.union([t.string, t.undefined]).

More complex types should go to init/codecs.ts.

Configuration

A global type describing the complete service-configuration is defined in init/index.ts. It will reference other types defining specific configurations, e.g. credentials for other services:

type Config = {
  database: DatabaseCredentials;
};

Other configuration-types may live in own files/folders or in init/index.ts, depending on complexity.

The Config type should be instantiated in init/config.ts. Typically, it starts by piping process.env to the environment-codec, and then putting environment-variables into Config values.

This could become a long, messy function, but typically it's rather simple code.

If this gets too long, split it into specific files (e.g. db.init.ts, just like the configuration-types).

Dependency injection

wishing-wells relies on manual dependency injection, to make the code testable and separate initialization code from "actual" business-code, without needing some framework/library etc.

All dependencies need to be defined in init/index.ts:

export type Dependencies = {
  errorMiddleware: ErrorRequestHandler;
  loggingMiddleware: Handler[];
  helloHandler: Router;
};

The function wire() takes the configuration as input and then initializes all dependencies (of course in required order),
and returns them as required by the Dependency type.

Initialization

The main() function initializes the express-application by plugging together config, dependencies and different middlewares in the required order.

If something fails at initialization (e.g. reading environment variables) the strategy is to simply throw and thus quit.

Error handling

Wishing-well's idea of error-handling is to wrap errors where they occur into custom errors. Adding additional context, an appropriate http-status-code and the original error (as cause-property).

Custom errors should extend WishingWellError which defines the basic structure, i.e. status-code. Sometimes it makes sense to further distinguish errors, e.g. "retryable errors" and "fatal errors", which could be done by a required property in the WishingWellError or via further abstract subtypes.

Then this error can bubble up, and should ultimately be unwrapped and thrown by the handler. It will then be picked up by a custom express error-handler (handler/errorMiddleware.ts).

"Bubbling up" means in this case of course to return an Either.Left in functional code (or throw in imperative code).

Example

You have two abstractions to access different Rest-Apis, e.g. the github-api and the twitter-api, probably using axios. If the http-request fails, axios returns an AxiosError. The abstraction for the API knows best what different status-codes of the API mean, so they should wrap it inside errors like InvalidGithubCredentialsError or InvalidTwitterCredentialsError. For this contrived example, let's assume the github-credentials where originally provided by the user of the microservice, that would typically result in a 401/403 error. On the other hand, if your services provides the twitter credentials via configuration, then it's "your fault" and the service should return error 500. Now imagine you would bubble only the AxiosError with status 401. It's hard to later decide what to do with a (low level) error.

Input validation

Use io-ts to validate "complex" input (e.g. req.body). "Simple" input like query-parameters can of course be modeled as simple typescript type, e.g. {q?: string}.

Since validation typically happens as the very first thing in handlers, it's a pragmatic way to check if the validated input isLeft and then throw immediately a BadRequestError.

Logging

Pino is being statically initialized at startup and a global variable logging can be used everywhere, so no need to pass through a logger instance. It tracks context of requests via async_hooks. Pino formats logs as JSON by default, but for development set the environment-variable LOG_PRETTY=1 to use pino-pretty.

Functional Core, Imperative shell

Wishing-well follows the idea of functional core, imperative shell, where main() and express-handlers are the imperative shell doing side effects (e.g. throw, call res.send(), etc.).

All other code (functions, classes injected into the init-handler functions) should be written in a functional style, wrapping side-effects into Either and TaskEither (in effect this also means no async/await (required) outside of handlers).

An exception to this rule is logging. Logging is a valid use case for a "magic, global" variable which can be called from everywhere.